Category: Uncategorized

Likely yes.

See:

• Does Quora’s policy on joke answers need to be reformed or modified? Many people believe it’s inconsistently and arbitrarily enforced.
• What is Quora’s policy on humorous answers/reviews?
• Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s answer collapse policy? What types of answers aren’t allowed on Quora?

And in particular:

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on humorous answers/reviews?

Humorous answers and reviews are allowed if they make the page more helpful to someone who is sincerely interested in learning the answer to the question; otherwise they are not. Answers and Reviews that are intended as jokes are not helpful responses. In addition, humorous answers and reviews that deliberately misinterpret the intent of the question/topic will be collapsed.

Quora may allow a satirical answer if it is couched with a “but seriously, …” or a “as the following reductio ad absurdum would illustrate”. But a straight joke answer will usually be reported, typically by another user, and will be collapsed.

The policy does claim that if an answer already has more than 50 upvotes (which yours did, OP: Jack Menendez’s answer to Why Trump is considered to be the greatest president in America history?), the collapse needs to be approved by three moderators.

I really am not defending Quora reflexively on this. There are some things I don’t like about Quora’s policies, and some more that I dislike about how they are implemented.

But the premise of Quora is not open-ended writing like Medium, or provocative literature like what Swift wrote. The premise of Quora is informative responses to sincere requests for information (which can still be humorous, as long as an actual answer is in there). The question may have been bait, as John Gragson answered elsewhere, but the culture is either to ignore it, or to make the response unambiguously framed.

In truth, if you (or Jon Swift) had just appended “… but yeah, no”, there would have been less room for instacollapsing.

There is a vital role for polemic in society. And maybe Quora is “a purveyor of ignorance and half truths”, as you put it in your answer, by suppressing polemic. But Quora has decided that it is not primarily a purveyor of polemic. Hence, after all, the aggressive policing of BNBR.

Context is Should there be a revolt by authors against Quora Censorship?, initiated by Jack Menendez in protest of the collapsing of Jack Menendez’s answer to Why Trump is considered to be the greatest president in America history? See also: Would Quora moderators collapse Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” answer to the question of how to solve poverty?

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Matthew Sutton : https://www.quora.com/Should-the…

A “revolt” will not be particularly useful or effective. In all likelihood it will be counter-productive.

There’s tens of millions of Quora users—perhaps even a hundred million—with many new users showing up daily. There’s no Quora writers’ union that can shut down site contributions. While Top Writers might be cozy with some staff at Quora, as a group they have no power whatsoever. A revolt on Quora’s site will be shut down with ease; a revolt from exile outside of the site will go unnoticed.

A few upset indivuals leaving or being banned at a time is hardly noticeable—even extremely prolific ones with wide exposure. Had many of those valuable voices stayed there might be hope for a constructive discourse. While I didn’t respond to your A2A request, I am still here: able to engage you and share what few insights I can offer.

Quora is a company. It may not be one with a revenue stream yet but they have owners and investors that have invested a lot of money developing a platform and cultivating a broad userbase. Quora management has to answer to those folks and must protect its platform. Quora’s core business is not in offering “free speech” and “due process”.

Losing a few users here and there won’t make any difference, and sad as it is to say Quora won’t mourn the loss of a few easily replaceable writers. Even if every Top Writer left the site tomorrow, Quora could simply award a few hundred alternates TW status. Boycotting Quora won’t cost them a dime and will free up server space and reduce moderator workload—that’s the reality of the power dynamic at play.

I’m not defending Quora but I think everyone has to arrive at their own conclusion as to how much of themselves they feel comfortable in investing in a site that won’t be compensating them for their time, which may ban them at any time, and will keep all of that contributor’s content once they ban said user.

I was edit-blocked thrice and was informed I was on the verge of an account ban. I could’ve have continued contributing answers after this but I realized that I was now on borrowed time and that if I continued answering questions moderators would eventually find cause to ban my account. I once warned writers on the Quora Writers’ Feedback Facebook page that another writer purge might be underway and I was banned from that forum in apparent retaliation immediately thereafter.

I still enjoy reading and commenting on the site and so I decided it was in my best interest to remain on cordial terms with everyone and simply become a passive, non-contributing Quoran. It’s worked out well over the past two years. And honestly it’s been so long since I’ve written an answer I don’t really even miss it any more. For writing Medium is probably a better site for many people (though I found the “targeted writing” of Quora question’s more inspiring to me personally). Point being there are other options out there if I find myself frustrated with Quora’s policies or policy enforcement.

By completely boycotting Quora in protest I would have no voice nor presence here at all. While I’m currently something of a “ghost” on Quora…and may forever roam around in “purgatory”…if I simply vanished I’d be locked out; I wouldn’t be around to leave this comment. I doubt I’ll be around long enough to see Quora reform itself but then again it’s not impossible—authoritarian hierarchies intolerant of criticism, unwilling to reform, and who depend on opacity seldom last long. If I simply abandoned Quora I’d never see Quora open up and I would eliminate any chance I could steer any discussions in that direction. The inevitable arc of history is towards openness and transparency and I don’t imagine Quora proving an exception.

Quora obviously has a festering problem alienating once-loyal, committed users who were well-liked by the community of writers. I’m not sure how they will fix this or even if they will soon acknowledge that such a problem exists. Although a temper tantrum may feel cathartic, a “revolt” won’t accomplish anything—of that I’m certain.

Quora can and will ban “revolutionary” accounts out-of-hand, and they won’t lose a wink of sleep over it. Sticking around and being a reasonable, consistently respectful voice advocating greater transparency is probably the best any user can do. Only until a critical mass of users collectively become conscious of the systemic problems with Quora will there be any motivation for Quora management to accommodate them. That won’t happen for a very long time, and at the current rate that users vanish without a trace, it may never happen.

Bug? or Feature?

All the answers given here have been excellent. I particularly liked Kai Neagle’s.

Several factors have contributed to Australia recently turning into postwar Italy, and most of them have already been pointed out.

• Labor has always been factionalised. The Liberals have become much more factionalised recently, with the resurgence of the reactionary right.
• Both parties have moved to The Mushy Centre. As a result, there is not a lot of sunlight between them, and there is pressure on them from their extremes: from the Greens, and from One Nation and other right wing populists.
• This has made the parties much more managerial than ideological, and accordingly much more prone to panic at poll results rather than sticking it out. If you don’t have an ideology, the only reason you are in power is to stay in power.
• Labor as a movement has suffered much more from the Twilight of the Ideologies, the demise of socialism, and the Hawke-Keating neoliberal reforms. So the cracks were always going to show there first.
• Labor was also structurally more prone to do this kind of thing, to begin with.
• Pundits at the time talked of federal Labor contracting Sussex Street disease—referring to NSW Labor, which has always been much more ruthless.
• The unionist Paul Howes, who was instrumental in toppling Rudd for Gillard, was derided as one of Labor’s faceless men. The insult is 50 years old: it comes from Menzies. The only difference with Howes is that he didn’t stay faceless: he gave TV time to anyone who would ask.

Many of these factors are shared throughout the Western world, and other answers have already mentioned them. They don’t explain why Australia has remained unstable. Others have brought up procedural reasons, which are beyond my expertise. I’ll offer a simpler reason.

Precedent.

Yes, the party leader is leader only by the grace of the party room. But toppling a sitting prime minister used to be Unthinkable. And the country was shell shocked when Rudd was toppled. I was in Melbourne’s Fed Square when it happened, and I remember dozens of us staring mouths agape at the TV screens.

Once it happened, the unthinkable became thinkable. And eventually, expected.

As is so often the case here: there are some good answers (Vote #1 Andreu Massana’s answer; Vote #2 or #3 Laurie Chilvers’ answer), there are some bad answers, and this is my answer.

• The initial hope of Zamenhof, and indeed of most people in the auxiliary language movement, was that the global language would be imposed top-down, by a committee of wise people.
• That’s not what happened, and that was never likely to happen. Lingua francas are bottom-up affairs. They are bottom-up affairs, to be sure, that harness an existing structure of power. But usually people don’t learn the empire’s language because the empire told them to. They learn it because it’s in their interest to.
• Esperanto, FWIW, endured as a bottom-up affair itself; and as I was discussing with Clarissa Lohr in the related answer to Could Esperanto seriously become the lingua franca?, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Esperantists are now what Zamenhof had called “Esperanto chauvinists”.
• When a language is adopted bottom up:
• Noone cares how perfect the language design is. People are prepared to jump through all sorts of hoops if it will get them advantage. They put up with English spelling, after all.
• When China overtakes America, it’ll be interesting to see whether Chinese As Lingua Franca will put up with Chinese characters. It may well do.
• Noone cares how rich the culture of the empire is. You think all those kids learning English in Indonesia give a damn about Milton?
• Conversely, all those people who assert how culturally vacuous Esperanto is? I give even less of a damn about you. That’s an argument from ignorance.
• Noone cares how flexible and adaptable the language of the empire is. They’re learning it for purely instrumental reasons.
• Noone cares how fair the power imbalance is: yes, the natives of the empire speak the language better than you ever will, but we redress the power imbalance in our face with the tools we have now, not with the tools of future hope.
• People care about their own culture surviving, and keeping the empire’s lingua a second language; but they don’t care as much as you might like. Languages die all the time, after all, and they usually die through the choices made by their speakers.
• What people do care about is how much access to power and money they can get through the lingua franca. That’s why the native languages of empires tend to do quite well. There is a niche for pidgins (such as the original Lingua Franca), when there isn’t a clear dominant player, or when the language contact is more circumstantial; but that isn’t the world we’re talking about now.

Ernest W. Adams’ answer to How is deleting others’ comments on your answer justified?

Ernest W. Adams’ answer to Why does Ernest W Adams disable comments?

I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did.

But while a lot of work over several years went into the TLG redaction of the 1940 LSJ (involving myself among others), that work involved proofreading, corrections to mistagging, typos or misprints in the digitisation (and very occasionally the source text), and updates to the hyperlinked citations. No substantive textual content was altered or added. The hyperlinks wouldn’t make sense in print, and the corrections over the source text really were slight. I don’t see an incentive for the TLG to do so, when the original LSJ is still in print.

The TLG Canon hasn’t been reprinted since 1990, and that represents original TLG work, which is updated and available online. If that has not been reprinted in book form, LSJ is far unlikelier still.

Again: I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did.

I’m with Lyonel Perabo. Vote #1: Lyonel Perabo’s answer to At what point does a spiritual tradition cross the line into a religion?

The distinction between spirituality and religion is not a particularly old one. People who want to believe in something beyond the material, but want to dissociate themselves from Christianity or other formalised religions, say that they’re spiritual instead. Noone talked like that before the Enlightenment. And what is the stark dividing line between a spirit and a god supposed to be? Between reverence and worship? Between belief and creed? Just organisation? But how can organisation be… prevented? And why exactly should it be?

The distinction looks bogus to me, and reminds me of another bogus distinction. In the 19th century, Westerners discovered that the Ancient Greeks practiced magic. There are full on voodoo dolls and curse tablets in graves.

The Westerners who claimed intellectual descent from the Ancient Greeks were pretty distressed to discover this: their Graeco-Judaean construct of religion was a noble, elevated thing, nothing to do with voodoo shit. (Wait till you look more closely at Talmud lore, let alone the Kabbalah; Rabbinic Judaism wasn’t immune from magic either.) And Western scholars invested decades trying to establish a bright red dividing line between the stupid ancient commoners’ magic and the noble ancient philosophers’ religion.

The recent conclusion I’ve seen: there is none. It’s all expressions of faith in a world beyond the material. The incentive to differentiate them is a modern, class-based prejudice against magic.

And I suggest, the incentive to differentiate spirituality from religion is similarly a modern prejudice against contemporary organised religion.

Trusted Reporting (Quora feature): Trusted reporters (who are not moderators but designated power users) can insta-collapse an answer or comment: Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog. They cannot delete them though.

Moderators who are in-house Quora staff are also Quora users (all in-house staff seem to be), and they can still upvote and downvote. Their upvote or downvote may count for more than others’, just as mine likely counts for more than J Random Quora user’s: their impact depends on the user’s PeopleRank, and in-house Quora staff are likely to have high PeopleRank just by virtue of seniority, if not office.

There may or may not be moderators who are outsourced; we don’t know. If there are outsourced moderators, we do not know whether they are Quora users as well, and whether they can accordingly upvote or downvote.

But like I said, the capability for insta-collapse, which trusted reporters have (and which I’d assume moderators have) has far more potential to, as you put it, sink a proverbial ship than a mere downvote does.

I post some answers anonymously, due to their subject matter.

I will not now be able to engage about any of my anonymous content, nor find out if anyone has engaged with it.

This makes me disinclined to continue to post any of my content on that subject matter anonymously. Even if it is anonymous, I still write to be engaged with, not to hurl out a message in a bottle. And since I can’t post on that content under my own name, for reasons of sensitivity, I am considering not posting it at all.

Anonymity was being abused and used frivolously, and some action was needed. This action is excessive, even if it does have technical reasons (overscrupulousness about anonymity), and it is a disincentive for me to post anything anonymously.